Marketing has been evolving together with technology, and it has managed to break the fourth wall and drag audiences right into the plot. Instead of being mere spectators of the show and passive recipients of marketing messages, customers are now active participants in brand building and product development. Their opinion is more important and influential than ever, so if you want to gain a competitive edge it’s time to start leveraging interactive marketing. Creating an immersive experience is a must if you want to grab your audience’s attention, as marketing is a two-way street. Consumers are now exposed to tons of quality content and they’re fed up with pushy, self-absorbed ads, so you have to give them what they want.
Image Attribution: Pixabay
What is Interactive Marketing?
You can think of it as of a constructive dialogue. Traditional marketing is, basically, a monologue in which a company talks about its products’ features and benefits, and tries to persuade a silent and passive consumer to purchase it. Interactive marketing, also known as trigger-based marketing and event-based marketing, uses all kinds of marketing initiatives in order to respond to customers’ actions. This is a dynamic process that changes and adapts in order to produce more relevant marketing messages and content based on customers’ preferences. According to some statistics, interactive marketing is somewhere between 2 and 12 times more effective than traditional marketing. Here’s what marketers said about this kind of marketing in a survey by Demand Metric:
Benefits of Interactive Marketing
By employing interactive marketing you’ll be able to connect with your customers on a more profound level and get their feedback. This will, in turn, help you personalize your marketing efforts, identify consumer demands, identify your target audience more precisely, and help you fix and adjust your products or services. Audience engagement is another important benefit, as it strengthens your relationship with your customers, and builds trust and loyalty. All this improves your communication with your audience, and if we take into consideration findings of a survey, according to which 68% of customers leave a business relationship because they perceive a company as being indifferent towards them, it’s clear how important it is. So, interactive marketing shows that you value your customers’ opinion and that you care, which ultimately dramatically improves retention.
Types of Interactive Content
There are a couple of key types of interactive content that you can incorporate into your marketing strategy.
Quizzes are among the most popular types of interactive content. Although their main intention is to provide fun and entertainment, businesses can use them for educational purposes or to promote their relevant content. Besides that, all people are at least a tiny bit narcissistic and they like to take selfies, talk about themselves, and learn more about themselves, so by employing quizzes you can capitalize on this psychological trick, and engage your customers in an entertaining journey to self-discovery. Solve our quiz “The 7 Types of Sales People” and find what your strengths and weaknesses are.
- Polls and surveys are amazingly effective for feeling the pulse of your audience. We’ve already discussed the importance of this type of content in another article, and the bottom line is that asking for feedback is an essential element of prospect nurturing. They can provide you with answers to some crucial questions about your customers’ purchasing decisions and behavior. Regular metrics are limited to How many and How much, while polls and surveys can reveal Why, What, and How. Polls and surveys are more effective as they encourage people to engage more than a static mail, tweet, or SMS.
- Calculators are among the most useful tools because they’re helpful and informative. Money is one of people’s most common concerns, and by providing your audience with a possibility to easily calculate their taxes, ROI, or interest rates, you’ll keep them coming back to your website. 51% marketers say that online calculators are extremely effective during the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey.
- As you already know, video dominates content marketing at the moment, but the interactive video is even more effective when it comes to engaging customers because it provides them with the ability to determine the outcome. You can incorporate all kinds of clickable, interactive elements, and create a dialogue with your audience. You can add a question, quiz, survey, calculator, or even a lead-generation form directly to the video. Apart from being highly engaging and entertaining to your audience, video can also provide you with all kinds of data that you can forward to marketing automation software, thus triggering lead scoring, nurturing, and segmentation.
- Games are entertaining and everybody likes to play them. This means that they can attract wider audiences, and get them to spend more time on the website, which gives you lots of opportunities for conversion. Interestingly, games work well for both B2C and B2B oriented businesses, and they’re equally addictive regardless of demographics.
Image Attribution: StockSnap
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